OASIS members have formed a new discussion list as a forum for testing
interest in a new OASIS Biometric Web Services (BWS) Technical Committee.
The list is open to the public for subscription and
dialog,
and the
list archives for 'bws-discuss' are publicly accessible.

The purpose of the TC under consideration (provisionally) is to define,
enhance, and maintain open standards that facilitate the use of
biometrics and biometric operations over a services oriented architecture,
such as web services. At its inception, the TC will specifically target
web services for biometric devices: a specification describing a suite
of sensor- and modality-agnostic 'low-level' acquisition operations
(e.g., sensor initialization, sensor configuration, data capture, data
transfer).

Participants in the 'bws-discuss' discussion list are invited to comment
on possible scope, focus, and deliverables for the new TC. According to
an initial (draft, provisional) charter
proposal, the purpose of this TC would
be to define, enhance, and maintain open SOA standards for biometrics
and biometric operations. Improving interoperability is a key enabler
for making biometrics more viable within multifactor authentication.
The TC work would help bring parity to biometrics as compared to other
technologies, such as cryptographic certificate use and management, where
web service standards are markedly more mature.

According to the early draft, at its inception, the TC would target
creation of two
different standards: (1) Biometric Devices: a standard
for controlling the 'low-level' operations necessary for performing
biometric acquisition (e.g., sensor initialization, sensor configuration,
capture, sensor data download). (2) Biometric Workflow Description
Language: a standard for describing a specific series of biometric
acquisition activities, along with the conditions and rules that might
dynamically change its execution.

"A recent National Academy of Sciences report Biometric Recognition:
Challenges and Opportunities (2010) states that 'biometric systems
should be designed to anticipate the development and adoption of new
advances and standards, modularizing components that are likely to become
obsolete, such as biometric sensors'. Work already underway at the U.S.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) seeks to address
this gap.

On September 21-23, 2010, NIST demonstrated a wireless biometric sensor
interoperability prototype at the 2010 Biometric Consortium Conference
in Tampa, Florida. This prototype demonstrated to government, industry,
and academia that by leveraging web services technologies, it is possible
to easily bring biometric acquisition to a wide variety of platforms,
including cellular phones and tablet devices. This work has the ability
to change the landscape of remote authentication and mobile identification
by bringing more intelligence to biometric devices as well as
facilitating re-use of hardware, software, and the communications
protocols that underlie the world wide web.

The demonstration of universal biometric device control via wireless Web
Services illustrated how simple Web Services can be used as a means to
enhance interoperability so that the capabilities and reach of biometrics
are significantly improved. Having a Web services-based biometric device
interface helps to: (1) Establish multimodal biometrics—by providing
a uniform electronic interface to all biometric sensors, system
components do not have to change their behavior if different modalities
or sensors are used; (2) Improve biometric sensor acquisition—by
providing a guaranteed level of interoperability, system owners could
take advantage of improvements in biometric sensor technologies by
swapping one conformant sensor with another; (3) Enable mobile biometrics,
because accessing web technologies is not only limited to workstations
and servers: modern cellular phones, tablets, and even gaming consoles
all understand the language of the Web. Using Web services means improving
the overall reach of biometrics..."

NIST is participating in the technical work of the OASIS Biometric
Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) Integration TC, and recently initiated
a project to provide a reference implementation for the OASIS Biometric
Identity Assurance Services SOAP Profile. Feedback from this effort will
be fed back into the BIAS SOAP Profile draft and associated WSDL/schema,
ensuring its utility and correctness. NIST representatives are also
participants in the new OASIS 'BWS' discussion list to test interest in a
Biometric Web Services (BWS) Technical Committee (TC), supporting the
goal of using OASIS as a venue to develop this new biometrics standard.

Members of the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group have
published a Proposed Recommendation for CSS Color Module Level 3.
Public comment is invited through November 25, 2010. A separate
implementation report contains
a test suite and shows that each test
in the test suite was passed by at least two independent implementations.
The list of comments on the most recent Last Call draft explains the
changes that were made since that draft. Comments received during the
Candidate Recommendation period and how they were addressed in this
draft can be found in the disposition of comments... The bibliography
contains normative references to two W3C specifications that are not
Recommendations at the time of publication, although they are believed
to be stable. It is currently the intention to keep this specification
at Proposed Recommendation level until those specifications are
themselves Proposed Recommendations or Recommendations...

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering
of HTML and XML documents in a variety of ways, including on screen and
paper. CSS uses color-related properties and values to color the text,
backgrounds, borders, and other parts of elements in a document. This
'CSS Color Module Level 3' specification describes color values and
properties for foreground color and group opacity. These include
properties and values from CSS level 2 and new values.

CSS beyond level 2 is a set of modules, divided up to allow the
specifications to develop incrementally, along with their implementations.
This specification is one of those modules. The Working Group does not
expect that all implementations of CSS3 will implement all properties or
values. Instead, there will probably be a small number of variants of
CSS3, so-called 'profiles'. For example, it may be that only the profile
for 32-bit color user agents will include all of the proposed
color-related properties and values...

A number of features that were present in the 14-May-2003 Candidate
Recommendation are no longer present in this specification. However,
the call for implementations for these features remains, and they
may be included in a future level of this specification given sufficient
implementations and a test suite to demonstrate interoperability.
These features are: ICC Color Profile: the 'color-profile' property;
the 'rendering-intent' property; the '@color-profile' at-rule; the
'flavor' system color..."

Members of the IETF Energy Management Working Group have published an
initial level -00 Informational Internet Draft for the Energy Management
(EMAN) Applicability Statement. The EMAN WG, chartered in the in the IETF
Operations and Management Area, is specifying requirements for energy
management to address energy management properties that will allow
networks and devices to become energy aware. The EMAN WG will create a
framework document that will describe extensions to current management
framework, required for energy management. This includes: power and
energy monitoring, power states, power state control, and potential power
state transitions. The framework will focus on energy management for
IP-based network equipment (routers, switches, PCs, IP cameras, phones
and the like). Particularly, the relationships between reporting devices,
remote devices, and monitoring probes (such as might be used in
low-power and lossy networks) need to be elaborated..."

Document abstract: This memo describes the applicability of the EMAN
framework for a variety of applications. We show how network elements
and applications can use EMAN, describe the relevant information
elements (IEs) for those applications and present opportunities and
limitations. We furthermore describe relations of the EMAN framework
to other architectures and frameworks.

The document explores the relation of EMAN to other frameworks and
technologies, including IEC, ISO, ANSI C12, EnergyStar US EPA, DMTF
(Desktop And Mobile Architecture for System Hardware - DASH), SmartGrid,
NAESB, ASHRAE and NEMA, and ZigBee... Example considerations include
Building Networks, Home Energy Gateways, Datacenters, and Smart Power
Strips...

EMAN will enable heterogeneous energy consumers to report their own
consumption, and will enable external system to control them. There are
multiple scenarios where this is desirable, particularly today considering
the increased importance of limiting our own carbon footprint and reducing
operational expenses. Over time, more and more devices will be able to
report their own energy consumption. Smart power strips and some
Power-over-Ethernet switches are already able to consumption of the
connected devices (proxies)... One aspect of EMAN is to enable this
reporting by providing a standard framework applicable to various devices,
consumers or proxy devices. Being able to know who's consuming what,
when and how at any time by leveraging existing networks, and across
various equipment is one pillar of the EMAN framework..."

"Over the past 30 years, the Internet has proven to be a revolutionary
technology, so much so that it has run far beyond its original scope.
The original Internet was designed as a network to connect academic
researchers. From these humble beginnings, it grew into a global
communications network as integral to our lives as roads, telephones,
and public utilities. Increasingly, it's taking on roles formerly
performed by other infrastructures, such as mail (email), phones (voice
over IP), television, and movies (streaming video). Simply put, it's
the global network of the 21st century... In this article, we briefly
review US and European approaches to addressing the future Internet's
core infrastructure problems.

In Europe, technology companies, government, and academics have allied
together to build the infrastructure for a new service economy that ties
all facets of our personal and professional lives into one end-to-end
system. The general European consensus is that the future Internet must
meet a wide array of challenges and opportunities.... Europe regards the
future Internet as a matter of public policy; consequently, government,
academia, and businesses have banded together in a collaborative research
agenda. The most prominent publicly funded US research efforts tend to
focus on networking infrastructure and architecture. The notion of a
clean-slate approach (redesigning the Internet from scratch) animates
much of the research in the US... According to David Clark, a senior
research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, US government funding agencies tend to support research into
long-term questions and put less emphasis on commercial applications.

In Europe, funding is often associated with ministries of trade or
commerce and thus seeks commercial relevance. In the US, government-
funded initiatives focus on architectural questions, and there's less
talk of a holistic model of the future Internet. Europeans tend to
consider more regulatory questions up front. According to Clark, US
researchers tend to leave short-term commercial applications to the
private sector (indeed, some of the biggest US Internet successes such
as Amazon, Facebook, and Google were the result of smart entrepreneurs)
and let the government step in later to clean up the mess...

Both Europe and the US want to build an Internet that protects freedom — but they define freedom in very different terms. Europeans talk about
creating a free marketplace that prevents monopoly, lock-in, and
discrimination and guarantees openness and fairness, which often means
that government must set limits on company behavior. Americans often
associate freedom with government getting out of the way and allowing
businesses to operate with the least possible interference..."

Open source has been a successful driver in software innovation, but
how does it — or how can it — apply to hardware? A number of hardware
projects are testing open source concepts, from microprocessors to
microcontrollers to complete single-board computers. This article
discusses licensing, availability, community, and other challenges and
successes in making hardware open.

Open source software is one of the biggest success stories in technology
and business of the 20th and 21st centuries. The open software movement
was founded by Dennis Allison in his release of Tiny BASIC in 1975 with
the seminal quote, 'Let us stand on each other's shoulders, not each
other's toes'...

Now the success of open source software is creating a new movement: open
hardware. Since the late 1990s, engineers have sought ways to apply open
source concepts to computer and electronic hardware. The main stumbling
block, of course, is that software is easy to duplicate and can be copied
free of charge, while hardware is made up of actual matter — 'atoms
instead of bits,' as Chris Anderson said. Plus, hardware is generally
patented rather than copyrighted, and patents are expensive to both
obtain and defend. How can hardware be 'open sourced' to take advantage
of the huge benefits open source has to offer?

Hardware can never be 'free as in beer' because duplication always costs
something, and even the best-intentioned advocates can't afford to offer
physical products free of charge indefinitely. However, a physical product
is simply an implementation of a design, and the designs of hardware,
along with permission to create a physical product from those designs,
can indeed be made available free of charge with an open license, whether
copyrighted or patented. The licensing is up to the owner. In fact, open
hardware itself is still being formally defined. A workgroup of
contributors has been honing a definition since 2009, following Bruce
Perens' Open Source Definition. The new Open Source Hardware (OSHW)
definition is currently at V0.4 and is under discussion in the forum on the Open Hardware Summit web site..."